The Cacophobe

There’s a secret buried in this letter. What I’m about to tell you isn’t it: I am deathly allergic to ugliness, I have been since I was a boy, and by the time you read this, this affliction, which has so exquisitely disfigured my life, will, at last, have finished me.

None of this is metaphor, by the way; I’m not some fairy-queen tragedienne playing psychosexual charades. When I say “allergic,” I mean it literally, symptomatically. And by ugliness, I refer to an umbrella term of potential allergens including but not limited to ugly people and their ugly things, triteness, tackiness, the banal, the cliché, kitsch (but not camp), failed minimalism, failed maximalism, bad taste, bad manners, bad art, and infinite other vehicles of aesthetic distress. Ugliness of the milder variety induces ostrich-leather hives, iambically throbbing headaches, a lavish swelling of the tongue. Moderate ugliness brings on blue lips and audiovisual hallucinations, themselves too hideous to describe. In the presence of moderate-to-severe ugliness, I—like a much-pawed statue of the Madonna—weep tears of blood. And in the severest cases, this weeping turns to sweating—to the point of fatal exsanguination, even, should the ugliness not be removed.

You’ll notice I’ve provided no examples of ugliness. This isn’t me being coy. My hypersensitivity, you see, is so acute that to even speak of ugliness, to even entertain its notion, could potentially trigger symptoms. With the exception of the rare crumb of ugliness that I consider necessary to my secret (and which you’ll know by the occasional annotative bloodstain), I’ll leave things up to your no doubt talented imagination.

But what about specialists, you cry, outraged! Well, they’re no help at all. And I’ve seen quite a few, in my time. Between the ages of five (it forces you into precocity, this affliction) and sixteen, my life was spent being picked bone-clean by a veritable danse macabre of white coats. Nowadays, the only men who attempt any diagnoses at all are the snooty philosopher-fops (erasable mustaches, Byronic forelocks, aspirationally ironic tweed) with whom I’m occasionally set up by well-meaning but imbecilic friends of friends (I tend to read, for some reason, as homosexual). Ennui, they (over)pronounce. Weltschmerz. Acedia. Dipshit. Prick. Meanwhile, the women in my life call me, when they call me, more accurate epithets like “hopeless romantic.” Having since become somewhat of a specialist myself (it’s impossible not to, with this affliction), my expert opinion is it’s a cross between synesthesia and that extreme form of sun poisoning which forces children to live like vampires, but with the slimming effects and sex appeal and little red flourish of consumption. (Small comforts for a dying man.)

And what does such a man do for a living? (The polite way to ask how I’ve taken this long to die.) In my early twenties, I had a brief twinkle in the surprisingly big firmament of hybrid performance art/bad-boy criticism/Houdini-esque escapology. The Endurance Aesthete, they called me. My team would wheel me out at art openings, plays, readings, film premieres, etc., in my glass sarcophagus, dressed in nothing but a white designer speedo (a different couturier every night), blindfolded with silk, earmuffed with mink, and then rip my protection away, waiting for my defenseless body to gauge the work’s artistry. In the beginning, when my small audience largely consisted of plainclothes arbiters of taste (their drabness in wardrobe matched only by the flamboyance with which they destroyed careers), the pleasure lay in seeing the subtle ripple of bumps around my groin, or my lips flashing blue, or a single tear glittering like a ruby between my left ring and pinky toes. But as my fame grew, and the collective brow of my nightly multiplying audiences crept ever downward, and the mesmeric visual of my drained, hive-y, blue-lipped body submerged in blood before terrible art became a kind of sleazy billboard, and I its sordid roadside attraction, my agents began sending me to more obviously bad art, fatally bad art, until I nearly bled to death in front of a deliberately shat out video installation (home videos, for some reason, my body finds utterly revolting—oh, there goes a drop!).

After three years in the glass sarcophagus, I was forced to retire. With the exception of a far shorter second stint in celebrity, wherein I was kidnapped by husband-and-wife eco-terrorists who used my body to protest the Ravaging of Earth (rather unsuccessfully, I might add, my body apparently being quite indifferent to ecological collapse), my life since has been dedicated to the curation of a very small private museum of beautiful things that doubles as my home, my Gilded Lung, expanding it as best I can with ever dwindling royalties from my only book, White Speedo (bad ghost-plagiarized poetry paired with pretentious softcore pornography, every fifth page a me-scented scratch-n-sniff), as well as the occasional donation from my puny but murderously cultish fanclub (why don’t you put that imagination to good use).

So, as you can see, it’s been a lonely life, and a sad one, excruciating at times, terribly small too, my world reduced to a midnight-colored hallway beneath an angry painted sky, the walls lined with jewel-size religious art, and shadow-boxes housing extinct lepidoptera, and relics of long-dead professional beauties, and mirrors, so many wretched mirrors, with their false promises of space. Which means I’m quite lucky to be writing to you from a big, bright suite in a hotel so expensive as this. Even if it’s just for two days. Even if I’m only a guest, here by invitation from a bride who this morning became a wife, who will spend the weekend celebrating the happiest day of her life surrounded by her very best friends, among whom I am one-eyed king. I’ll miss her, that one. She was the first person I met with truly impeccable taste.

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I have to tell you about Dr. S., the second-to-last specialist I ever saw, at the age of sixteen. Now, you might think these specialist visits were hideous experiences. And indeed, many were, whole terrains of my childhood being completely unspeakable. But a few I found rather beautiful, actually. Those with Dr. S.—a tall, unsmiling woman who looked and dressed like a very chic, clean-shaven Rasputin—fell into the latter category. Sometimes, I would even fake symptoms so I could spend an hour at her mint-and-oxblood Italian modernist office, interpreting surreal engravings on cards of ivory, analyzing extempore the intricate clique dynamics of her garden eel colony, lying blindfolded on her asymmetrical chaise longue while a tape had me visualize patterns embroidered onto my brain. Denounce these methods as quackery if you like, but Dr. S. continues to be a genius in the field of experimental therapies. I was simply impossible to treat, my body’s stubbornness eventually earning me the coveted status of pet project.

Pet projects Dr. S. sent to the Retreat. Offered year-round, with stays booked in month-long increments, it took place at a sanatorium designed to resemble a neoclassical opera house that had crashed into an iceberg. The patients, who all appeared to be extremely attractive, aristocratic orphans in exile, were pictured in its matte brochure engaging in attractive exiled aristocratic orphan activities: reading by candlelight, binding books, churning butter, making candles, keeping bees. Your child, promised the brochure, after undergoing a multipronged therapeutic approach built around R&R&R&RR™ (rest, relaxation, recreation, and role reversal), would return “transformed.”

I, obviously, could not wait to go. Meanwhile, all Mother needed to hear was “transformed.” She was sick to death of paying for the upkeep of the first Gilded Lung; she wanted to focus on her own hobbies (please note the omission here), and also, she thought I was “retarded.” (A word that to this day gives me a rosy coronet of hives.) She booked me a stay for the entire summer at once. On the drive there, she punished me by belting out off-key a collection of Broadway ensemble showstoppers, doing every voice, rococoing her vibrato—a degree of ugliness she knew only made my tongue too thick for me to whine. So when we arrived, to punish her, I wept fake blood on her outfit, the winner of a morning-long deliberation she’d regretted as soon as she’d left the house.

My triumph was short-lived. As Mother screeched away, singing along to a solo-infested power anthem about the Paris Uprising of 1832, her discordant harmonizing and inexplicable Cockney making my head throb, I took one look around and fell to my knees. Blood, real blood, descended like a curtain at the end of act one.

 

Once again, you must deploy that terrific imagination. All I can tell you is the real patients were so unlike those featured in the brochure that, as a precaution, I had to layer horse blinders behind bug-eyed heiress sunglasses so I wouldn’t bleed to death. (If you must have a visual, simply picture all the subcultures with accoutrements readily purchasable at your nearest mall, triple the suggested acne, and then add—as was the fashion of the time—the ears and tails of nocturnal scavengers in hackle-raising hues.) And needless to say, exiled aristocratic orphan activities, when devoid of exiled aristocratic orphans to do them, are virtually indistinguishable from the drudgery of monastic life.

Unbeknownst to me, I was also making myself sick. You see, my taste level, intellectually speaking, had yet to fully develop. (The immense gulf between my mind and body’s tastes, I confess, is why my Gilded Lung remains so very small.) But physically, I knew exactly what ugliness was, so frequently I triggered myself. This was the phase where my fashion sense could best be described as disgraced coloratura soprano of a certain age, thrice-divorced. (Think snakeskin brocade, dyed fox collars, brooches the size of grenades.) I still cross-dress—a distasteful word—not because I’m not utterly secure in my masculinity, but because I find the vast majority of menswear thoroughly hideous. But try explaining that to a sanatorium’s worth of hardened career malcontents. They, like my body, knew I looked like an idiot, and I was punished, harshly, by both.

It appeared I would be under house arrest for the summer. I despaired. How many days could a boy conceivably play dress up before he lost his mind?

Four, apparently. On day five, hallucinating from the boredom, sickened by my clothes, I burned them all and dove, headfirst, from my first-floor window, straight into a fountain depicting a lusty faun with no arms.

Before the world could go red, it went black.

 

Amnesia, I must say, does wonders for resetting one’s tolerance for ugliness. What a glorious day, I thought, to puzzle out some possible sartorial permutations! But when I opened the wardrobe, my clothes were gone. Details of yesterday frolicked horribly in my head.

Before the world could go red, my eyes adjusted to the black gleam of garment bags all neat in a row. Inside: giant shards of wool in dark emerald and midnight plum; pops of leopard; crushed velvet socks; long silk scarves, barely thicker than ribbons, in every shade of cream. Clothes, yes, fit for a soprano of a certain age, but dramatic (Wagnerian, even!) not coloratura, thrice-widowed instead of divorced, and sans disgrace. I must have spent an hour just acquainting myself with their textures, wondering why the brochure would leave such a marvelous service out.

Then I spotted the note. Thick eggshell stationery, embossed with Cerberus as a greyhound, each head’s pearl choker dripping a different jewel, the eyes of the peripheral two delicately x’d out. In perfect penmanship, the author apologized for their peers’ tasteless behavior, prayed the clothes would cheer me up, and wondered if I’d be so good as to join them for tea that afternoon. (No mention whatsoever of my public defenestration—a class act!)

I spent another hour choosing a suitable outfit. At four, I followed the instructions enclosed in the note, and knocked on the door with the secret rhythm the writer had described.

Inside was a girl. She looked more like an anthropomorphic orchid mantis in a stop-motion children’s cartoon than a girl. Perched like one too, on a pile of pastel seersucker cushions I mistook for part of her clothes. (Her wardrobe, I’d discover, consisted almost solely of shrunken exotic car-dealer suits.) Before her: an elaborate tea set camouflaged among the confectionery. She embraced me in a way I couldn’t feel, but which made me wonder, wildly, if I still had my kidneys. She appraised me with her great unblinking eyes. I held my breath and awaited whatever repugnant thing she was going to say or do.

She only smiled. “I’m frightfully sorry,” she said. “From the window—I rarely leave my room you see—from the window you looked shorter. Alterations are in order, I’m afraid. But there’s plenty of time for that later, after we’ve become best friends. For now, tea.”

Her name was—is—Claude. She had been sent to the Retreat for being a pathological liar.

 

That was the first thing she told me. In the conversation that followed, I learned that she was the progeny of the sluttish dauphin of a greyhound breeding dynasty and the brooding heiress of a greyhound-race-fixing syndicate; that their star-crossed coupling had resulted in a trail of shattered kneecaps and a set of conjoined triplets, of whom she was the sole surviving member, having bested her sister and brother in utero for the position of head head; that her mother had shrunk and kept the vanquished heads in a satin-lined box, taking them out once a year, wearing them as statement earrings to Claude’s elaborate, day-long birthdays; that she, Claude, had so resented this maudlin display of mourning (not to mention the yearly upstaging of her birthday) that she had been compelled, the morning she turned eight, to steal the heads; that, witnessing the resultant chain of hammy parental tantrums, she’d gotten addicted to that feeling, not dissimilar to the one she felt standing before a famous piano with a kerosene-scented perfume (as flammable as the real thing) and a match—the other reason she’d been sent to the retreat; that she’d waited patiently, far more patiently than her mother, year after year, to feel it a second time, the heads waiting patiently too in their satin-lined box until it was time to soar over the baroquely surgerized heads of spy wives and foreign dignitary sons and erstwhile child stars onto the track of the most prestigious greyhound race in the world, shattering even more kneecaps than her parents, making history at sixteen; and so on and so forth.

I had no idea how much of it, if any, was true. But I didn’t care. I could listen to her without incurring so much as a hive. Even more than that, I relished the things she told me. Up until that point, I’d developed a sense of beauty purely by what hurt me the least. But, listening to Claude speak, I felt as though someone had drilled a hole in my skull and poured in discernment. For the first time in my life, I was enjoying beauty for beauty’s sake.

The cliché makes my tongue swell, but it’s true: since then, we were inseparable. We did everything they said in the brochure, but in the evening, when most of my tormentors were indoors, and better-costumed than the most power-hungry fantasies of even the most putrefyingly spoiled exiled orphans. Claude, meanwhile, kept up a steady patter of charming, well, not anecdotes, more like lists: stolen keepsakes and their exact sentimental value, secrets traded, diaries read, ledgers of favors paid and unpaid, but so wittily, with such elegant detail, that I began to yearn for life outside the Gilded Lung. We passed notes, breaking into each other’s rooms, leaving them in increasingly funnier and more invasive places, and while I secretly wished we’d encounter each other during these capers, we never did.

We continued in this happy, delirious vein until July. One morning, during a greenly impressionistic storm, a pretty nurse (for obvious reasons I was assigned only good-looking staff) entered my room and announced we’d entered phase two of my Retreat. He would be escorting me to the office of a specialist, one Dr. V.

I was to begin therapy at once.

 

Because of the brochure’s lies, I assumed the worst. Six months prior, I’d gone through an embarrassing desensitization phase, the least cringe-inducing activity being ogling paintings of early Christian martyrs by talentless medieval hacks (such wastes of egg tempera!) until I’d soaked through my shirt. Souvenirs from this period cavorted about my head and crawled out of my eyes, flexing their holey abdominals at the pretty nurse, snapping their shapeless hides at his buoyant behind like locker-room towels.

At the threshold, the hallucinations disappeared. The office of Dr. V. (a hypnotherapist, per her plaque) was even better than Dr. S.’s—all cream and black with a Beardsleyan sensibility of line. What’s more, Claude was there, sipping tea like a Pope’s daughter, winking at me.

Then there was Dr. V. herself. My tongue swelled and flattened. Hives rippled briefly across my chest. Red beaded at a tear duct before changing its mind. Oh, Dr. V.! I had seen that face, that neck, staring back at me from those other religious paintings I’d found while looking for desensitization material, the ones of Judith and Holofernes where the male painter couldn’t resist baring a boob. But that’s all I could recognize, because she had entombed herself within a giant waistless smog-colored gown, her severe bowl-cut making her look like an uncomfortably attractive inbred Renaissance prince who’d monstrously outgrown his chateau-size kennel. Eventually, my body settled for a patch of hives behind my left knee and the vision of a tiny martyr who chased his still-beating heart around Dr. V.’s desk. You might be tempted, here, to interpret these crossed wires as moral foreshadowing. But I denounce such an insipid reading! My body’s response, I assure you, was entirely aesthetic. My palate, you see, had finally matured.

Despite Dr. V.’s title, Claude and I weren’t there for hypnotherapy. Role reversal, she said. Have you read our brochure? Patients here famously performed therapy on their own therapists. Completely unadulterated by training, or codes, or all the other dreadful little clots in the artery of catharsis.

“I am going now,” she said, “to tell you a cryptic story about my childhood that, if deciphered correctly, will explain all of my present neuroses.”

 

Her father, said Dr. V., was a renowned archaeologist who’d fled to private practice, making his family live out of steamer trunks like a troupe of exceptionally good-looking freaks, causing her to grow up far worldlier than other children, far preferring the company of adults. On the rare occasion she did encounter an equally formidable teen (usually some war criminal’s brat), the most they'd ever exchange was a silent, approving nod, à la rival poisoners at a diplomatic summit. Until, that is, she was our age, when her father was summoned to appraise the fresh acquisition of a certain CEO, a mysterious, suspiciously affordable, foul-weathered isle with an underwater ballroom rumored to be the sacrificial site of a cult of Victorian faerie worshippers. The CEO was unremarkable but for two things: his obsession with secret societies, and his son, a louche, curtain-haired fopling (with a face rather like mine, come to think of it), who’d been imprisoned on the island for his habit of staging Rube Goldbergian test-run suicides during his father’s most important black-tie galas. What more can I say? And what better place to consummate morbid young love than the possible orgy lair of some long-dead esoteric perverts? His father, discovering their plot, ordered her family off his island, introducing narrative tension, stakes. A storm approached. The young lovers timed their rendezvous better than the fopling's most intricate test-run suicides. The plot device made landfall. And, on the night in question, running through the first plinks of the summer storm in her mother’s lingerie, onto the treacherous jetty that led to the dome of the underwater ballroom, whereupon she found her suicide-obsessed, me-faced paramour exchanging his virginity with someone else, surrounded by middle-aged faerie worshippers in period-inaccurate Victorian garb, including the CEO, topless, in satyr haunches and spats, the storm breaking through a pane in the dome right at their synchronous climax. Were it not for her quick thinking and superlative swimming skills, said Dr. V., she would have perished with them all.

“Submechanophobia,” diagnosed Claude, immediately. “The debilitating fear of man-made objects underwater. Also, intimacy issues. Also, a pathological aversion to organized religion, possibly.”

It surprised me not at all that Claude would figure it out so soon. Did I mention she was really, really smart? Forgive me. In addition to all the things I’ve said, she was the smartest person I’d ever met.

 

For a pathological liar, Claude made a surprisingly sincere therapist, actively listening without judgment, making us get up before dawn so we could meet Dr. V. at the pool, where she had somehow already stashed all her stimuli, starting with perfume bottles and escalating to the armless, moss-covered statuary strewn all around the retreat. At first, I thought she was as obsessed with Dr. V. as I was, and laid innumerable conversational traps so we could nurse our mutual crush. She forsook them all. It was only when—during intermission at Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame (twice a month, for recreation, the Retreat invited roving opera troupes to perform), in a particularly evil impression of our therapist—she hissed that she’d rather “exchange virginities” with her next-door neighbor (a sullen bespectacled brute who liked to finger sinister, minimalist compositions on his cello without a bow, his door open, scowling at everyone who walked by) than hear me whine one more time about Dr. V, that I realized we’d become rivals. Thenceforth, we subjected each other to passive aggressive tortures during Dr. V.’s sessions, departing for our respective rooms afterward without so much as a nod, leaving each other increasingly more cryptic but obviously hostile notes.

One day, on my way to the pool, Claude accosted me behind a tree.

“Wall, wall, wall,” I said, my unconvincing delivery of tin-eared dialog blowing up my tongue. “Lak whah thaddanlah wants ta tak.”

“Are you, like, stupid?” she said. “My dear. My darling, myopic, oblivious solipsist. Godfrey. Buddy. You beautiful moron. My friend, look around you. We are but Athenian youth and maiden trapped within a labyrinth of potato and corn.”

“What?”

“Eyes and ears, you idiot,” she said. “The walls. They’re positively crawling with ’em.”

And she told me an extremely ugly secret.

 

Forgive me for starting on a new page. As you can see, the remembrance exsanguinated me so quickly I was unable to soldier through. Luckily for you, though, I know how I am at weddings, and always pack extra transfusions. (How’s that for myopic, Claude?) As I write this, I’m hooked up to my last bag.

For all our sakes, I’ll make it quick.

Whom was the ugly secret regarding?

Dr. V., hypnotherapist and pervert.

What had she done?

Hypnosis, with perverse intentions.

Who were the hypnotees?

Me, Claude.

To do what?

Me, to fall madly in lust with Dr. V.

Claude, to diagnose Dr. V. with submechanophobia and suggest, then perform, exposure therapy.

The both of us, at the apotheosis of said exposure therapy, to “correct” her thwarted night of passion while she watched; to stay away from each other outside her presence; to keep our mouths shut about the whole ordeal; to depart from the Retreat cured of our respective disorders; and to forget, of course, her instructions.

But not to forget the night itself?

No.

Why not?

What part of “and pervert” did I not understand?

But how did Claude know all this?

From not being hypnotized.

And how did she manage that?

Too paranoid, obviously, for hypnosis.

What were the two of us to do?

I’d receive instructions in the usual form, in the usual spot.

“But why didn’t you tell anyone?” I groaned, red trickling serenely over my eyes like a miniature waterfall in a Japanese garden in hell. “Why go along and pretend?”

Eyes and ears, remember? And please. Who would have believed her? Would you?

 

Midnight sharp. Two kids in impeccable clothes walk hand in hand through the moonlit grounds of an overpriced sanatorium for neurotic brats. They stop at the fountain of a lusty faun with no arms, where their therapist awaits. The three head through the woods. The walk to the lake isn’t long, but it is perilous, and full of inviting tangents, and terrifying. The moonlight snags on every pale thing: Egg sacs slice the air like pendulums. Centipedes squirm tiramisu-coloredly underfoot. The ass of the therapist traces a perverse figure-eight as she hikes. The entire way, the boy, from fright and anxiety and a general undernourishment of empathy, digs his fingernails into the girl’s palm, but she doesn’t complain. Their trail splits at the lake, one end cutting across its face to a glass dome breaking out of the water, the other spiraling into the earth. The therapist leads the kids down the latter. The staircase unfurls into a long, algal hallway, which ends beneath that dome. Through its miraculously clean glass, the therapist and the kids admire the moon. One of the kids (the girl, of course, citing some expert the boy doesn’t recognize) says the therapy would work even better if the kids were to reenact the therapist’s foiled virginity loss above the dome, while she watches underneath. Although this is not, in fact, what she hypnotized the kid to say, the therapist is so overcome with lust that she agrees.

The kids head back. Hallway, staircase, jetty, dome. The glass is thick enough not to break beneath their weight, but not so thick they can’t hear the therapist undressing underneath. The girl taps on the glass as you would the tank of a vivacious dinner lobster. The therapist in her vintage bullet bra and bloomers looks up. The girl recites the therapist’s ugly secret in an ugly version of the therapist’s voice. The therapist asks the boy if he knows the girl is, in addition to being a pathological liar, a malignant narcissist with a long line of accidentally dead best friends, all boys, a desperate and ugly arthropod of a girl who will say anything to complete the murder she’s been storyboarding for years. The therapist asks the boy if he wants to know how the girl’s other best friends died, how much their parents were bribed by her parents, how much their lives were worth. The therapist asks how the boy can bear all these loathsome clichés in the girl’s backstory. The therapist’s voice remains calm right up until it’s cut off, water rushing in from where the girl has powerdrilled a hole.

When the kids leave, it is thirty-four minutes after midnight. They’re back in their beds before one.

 

None of this has been the secret.

The secret is that that feeling, of a murder unfolding exactly as planned, down to the minute, to the dialog, even down to the moon, was the single most beautiful thing I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. Nothing since—not the few films that earned a rare “Limpid Coffin” during my Endurance Aesthete years, not the few arrhythmic murders I’ve attempted without Claude, not a single Gilded Lung—has ever come close.

I didn’t know this at the time, of course. I didn’t know it at breakfast the next morning, when I broke into Claude’s room, letter in hand, to see her in a hideous apron-lemon-yellow dress and matching cardigan (!), holding the hand of a sad-eyed horse-faced woman with a faint mustache and a tartan scrunchie, pretending we’d never met, telling her mother she’d like to go somewhere with fewer personality disorders next time as I stood there, stupidly, bleeding from the eyes. I didn’t know even as I was shipped back the next day to the first Gilded Lung, the retreat permanently shut down following the suicide of a documented submechanophobe. I didn’t know when I received, on that unforgettably embossed stationery, legally airtight threats not to squeal, which have pursued me from Lung to Lung over the decades, always waiting for me, hand-delivered when my back was turned, in some funny and invasive spot. I didn’t know until, I didn’t know until, a few weeks ago, the threats were replaced by an invitation to a wedding. Not as a guest but the talent—to bring the Endurance Aesthete out of retirement one last time, during the toasts, at the reception tonight, for a fee I couldn’t refuse.

I apologize, at this point, if the blood on this letter makes it hard to read. In between that sentence and this one, I have looked up a home video. Shot by a phone of a wedding, dated from this morning, between the first person, the only person, who has ever shown me the outer reaches of beauty, and a tall man with a greasy dirty-blond bob, the video installation artist whom my body panned violently enough to end both our careers, all the artists my body has ever panned, in fact, filling out on one side of the church, the members of my murderously cultish fanclub taking up the first two pews of the other, and what I’m going to do is deprive us, her and me both, of that perfectly planned sophomoric murder masterpiece for which she’s waited twenty years. Instead, I’m going to watch the video of that wedding from beginning to end, and again, and again, until I’m nothing more than the color red in a glass sarcophagus, at the center of a sickly fluorescent room, on the topmost floor of a gaudy hotel. A wedding present from an old friend. The most beautiful thing for miles.